I have always been fascinated by crows. They are known to be extremely smart and they can recognize and remember human faces. We have a lot of crows in our neighborhood, and I have been trying to befriend them. There is a bag of peanuts in their shells in our vestibule. When I see a crow perching on our roof or on the lamppost out by the street, I go get a couple of peanuts and put them outside while they can see me. No takers yet, no crow friends, but I will keep trying.

The protagonist of Hollow Kingdom is a domesticated crow. The crow is the narrator. The entire novel does not have a single human character. The only referenced human is Big Jim, who rescued the crow when he was just a chick and raised him as a pet. We know about Big Jim only based on flashbacks told by the crow.

Big Jim had named the crow Shit Turd, but he goes by S.T. (not surprisingly). His other pet is Dennis. S.T describes him this way:

Dennis is a bloodhound and has the IQ of a dead opossum. Honestly, I have met turkeys with more brain cells. I’d suggested to Big Jim that we oust Dennis because of his weapons-grade incompetence, but Big Jim never listened, intent on keeping a housemate that has zero impulse control and spends 94 percent of his time licking his balls.

Yes, S.T. thinks and talks like a human. In fact, all the animals in Hollow Kingdom talk, all the way from whales to spiders.

This book is about an apocalypse. All the humans get sick and eventually die of some virus, but not before they mutate in grotesque ways. Think of zombies that do nothing but eat each other and their pets. That’s got to suck if you are a dog or a cat trapped in a house with a sick human.

S.T. calls humans MoFos, based on the name Big Jim had for them. As he realizes that the MoFos are all going crazy, he goes on a mission to “free the domestics.” But how do you open doors and windows to let them out if you are just a crow, and your only friend is a (stupid) dog?

Hollow Kingdom reminded me a little of Stephen King’s The Stand. The premise in The Stand is that a manufactured disease kills off almost all of humanity. Only a very, very few survive to rebuild society. The entire story is based on a group of survivors trying to make a new world. In Hollow Kingdom, humanity disappears and nature comes back. Domesticated and wild animals try to make sense of what is happening.

Hollow Kingdom is a black comedy and satire, wrapped in a fable. It made me think about how fragile our society is, and how easily humanity could devolve.

Shit Turd’s point of view is delightful and comical. Overall, this book is unlike anything I have ever read before. Extremely readable, it’s also completely whacky.

I could not help but give it 4 stars.

Reading Hollow Kingdom is a whacky adventure.

I usually do not review books twice, let alone change my rating, but I am making an exception here with The Ruining Heaven. To explain, I have to backtrack to September 2015, when I first reviewed Hawser, by J Hardy Carroll. I stand by my review at that that time, so I won’t repeat it here, but I am upgrading my rating to four out of four stars.

I came across my review of Hawser by accident, following some comments in my blog, and I found myself in a memory block. While I had read the book, and reviewed it, and corresponded with the author directly about it, I oddly had no memory of  the details of the book. Granted, it’s been ten years, but you’d think I’d remember.

Nothing.

So I went to Amazon and tried to find it – but it did not appear to exist. Now I was really puzzled. How is it possible that I read a book, reviewed it, rated it highly, wrote a blog entry, and remembered nothing? And then the book does not seem to exist?

I then searched my emails for the author’s name and wrote to him. He responded within minutes, advised that he had edited the book and republished it under a new name, The Ruining Heaven. Oddly, the book is only available in paperback on Amazon, and since I am not reading hardcopy books anymore, I didn’t want to buy it in that format. Because by now I had decided that I’d have to reread this to figure out how I could possibly forget all about it. The author was kind enough to send me the Kindle version directly, along with two sequels (which I have not read yet).

Why did I forget all about it? It’s a very poignant story, particularly as some of the action takes place in wartime Germany, namely Silesia, where my own father was a child refugee during that exact time. The emotional damage inflicted on him from those experiences are still haunting him today, at age 89, and he keeps retelling the horrors he lived through. Ironically, I finished reading The Ruining Heaven while in a hotel room in Germany just a few days ago, right after having just talked to my father about just those times.

Why did I forget all about it? Two thoughts:

First, when you read as many books as I do, of as many different genres, it’s apparently possible to move on to the next one and erase the previous one. Sometimes, once I write the review, it frees me up to move on. There are only  that many grey cells available as I get older, and I need to clear the slate.

Second, the subject matter in the book is highly disturbing. War stories are never pleasant, and this one is crushing on many levels. Just like we tend to forget the hard periods in our lives, the embarrassing moments, the challenging episodes, as a natural block for our sanity, I may have blocked out most of this book just to protect myself and move on to better things.

Either way, The Ruining Heaven is a powerful war story. I thank the author for sending me the book and I highly recommend it, paperback and all.

From the outside it would look as if Kate Whittier was living a dream life in Southern California. Her husband is a successful businessman from an old-money New England family. They have two well-adjusted kids in elementary and middle school. She lives in a gorgeous home in a gated community north of San Diego. Her life revolves around her family and their friends. Taking the kids to soccer practice and games, attending family parties, taking walks along the San Diego beaches.

But Kate feels like an impostor in her own life. She comes from a broken family, and there are enough nightmares in her past that she has hidden her childhood and youth from all her friends and her husband. She thinks they don’t know who she is, the believes she is living a lie, and has been doing that for decades.

When her husband suddenly confesses to a sexual indiscretion, her life comes crashing down, and the lies and deceptions no longer hold up. In a matter of days, her peaceful and successful life unravels into a maelstrom of emotional chaos, confusion and even amnesia. While she is vulnerable and exposed, the demons of her past come knocking, and suddenly there seems to be no way out.

I would not normally pick up this book to read. The cover does not talk to me, and the description on the back is not about a subject I would choose read a novel about. But the paths of books into my life are sometimes mysterious, and I definitely  like to pick up material at random just to open my horizon.

My wife is in a book club of about a dozen women.  They read a book a month, and then meet and discuss it over dinner at one of their homes. Sometimes I read their book, if it’s the kind that interests me. Last month, they read Anastasia Zadeik’s second book,  The Other Side of Nothing. It turns out that one of the members knew the author and invited her to the book club meeting discussing that book. She came, and apparently they had a great meeting, the author posted about it in her Instagram page later, and left some hardcopies of her first novel with them, autographed. When my wife brought one of the copies home, I picked it up and started reading that night on the couch, and — could not put it down.

Blurred Fates is Zadeik’s first novel. I have read and reviewed the first works of other authors, sometimes by their personal invitations. (If you review as many books as I do, sometimes authors send you their books and ask for reviews. I have had a few of those). Blurred Fates stands out among first novels for a number of reasons:

It is impeccably edited. There isn’t a typo, there aren’t any grammatical errors that I noticed.

It is written in the first person present tense, which is unusual. But it also creates a sense of pace and urgency. Everything is happening right in front of the reader. It it hard to write that way, but Zadeik pulls it off effortlessly. I was right there with her all along, inside Kate’s head.

Being in someone’s head, in their thoughts, can be exhausting for the reader. I believe it’s also hard to write that way. But even with those challenges, Kate’s emotional and psychological turmoil never seems unreal. As a reader, you become Kate, and you feel her anguish and terror.

The author did a remarkable job with this novel. I am sure her second one, The Other Side of Nothing, is just as good.

Blurred Fates is a well-structured story about a subject of our times, namely rape, sexual abuse, domestic violence and child abandonment, and the permanent, lifelong psychological trauma that victims have to live with. With that, the author takes on a challenging subject and handles it well.

I also enjoyed her description of Kate’s life in San Diego. I live here, and I felt like I have been at her house and her community. I have driven by the soccer practices that she went to. I have shopped at the Vons and gone to the same Starbucks she is describing. And I have been to the same beaches. Those images and feelings brought it home even more vivid and clear than otherwise. This story played in my neighborhood.

I finished the book last night – I cranked through the last third of the book, and when I closed it and looked up, it was 1:25am. Need I point out: It’s a page turner.

Demon Copperhead is the nickname of Damon Fields, a boy who is born in Lee County, Virginia. In the heart of Appalachia, Lee County is the westernmost tip of Virginia, where Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee meet.  In 2023, it had a population of 21,745. The story begins with Damon’s birth in the 1980s. His father had already died a few months before in a tragic accident when diving into shallow water. His teenage mother was destitute but committed to raising her son as best she could.

Damon had copper-colored hair and his father’s good looks. But that is where his fortune ended. His early childhood is marked by extreme poverty, growing up in a single-wide trailer with his young mother who is using drugs. At the age of eleven, when his mother takes an accidental overdose, he becomes a full orphan and has to navigate life through foster homes with rampant abuse and one devastating setback after another. He grows up through sheer tenacity, an indomitable spirit, and with the help of a few key figures in his life.

Through the book we follow Damon from his early childhood through his adolescent years into early – very early – adulthood.

Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize. It is modeled after David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, which I have not yet read – but I think I will after reading this book. It is also eerily reminiscent of some of the stories told by J.D. Vance in his autobiography Hillbilly Elegy, which I had just read and reviewed in August.

The book tackles the plight of prescription painkillers that have addicted an entire generation of American youth, particularly in the South and in the poorer stretches of this country. It also tells about the social services “safety net” and what it can deliver – or can’t deliver – for some of the most vulnerable members of our society.

Reading Demon Copperhead, you will get to know him very well, but you’ll also make the acquaintance of a number of other memorable characters, including Fast Forward, Maggot, Dori, the ever good Tommy, and the elusive and thoroughly damaged Swapout.

I read this book over Christmas 2024, and it was mostly a depressing and shocking adventure, but one I am glad I went through. My rating key for four star books says:

Must read. Inspiring. Classic. Want to read again. I learned profound lessons. Just beautiful. I cried.

Well, only “must read” and “I learned profound lessons” applies to this one, but it’s definitely, absolutely a four star novel.

Louie Kemp was 11 years old when he was at summer camp in northern Wisconsin. There was another 12 year old boy with a guitar by the name of Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota. Along with a third boy, Larry Kegan, the three became best friends, for life.

Louie Kemp had unparalleled access to Bob Dylan, starting in their youth when Bobby already knew that one day he’d be a rock ‘n roll star. They were best friends throughout their lives. Louie tells anecdotes from their childhood on through Bob Dylan’s early years that bring the musician’s elusive and almost reclusive life to light. Most of the substance of the book focuses on the years of the Rolling Thunder Review, which Louie produced for Dylan at his request. He tells some backstories of the makings of Blood on the Tracks and Desire. Much of the narrative focuses on the 1970ies, when Dylan did some of his best work, went through his Christian transformation and then back to his Jewish roots.

I have read other Dylan biographies over the years, but this one was the most enjoyable. It’s not a biography, it’s a best friend telling the story of his youth and younger years, providing insight into the formation of a music legend, and doing it simply by telling little stories and vignettes that shed some light on the person we all know as Bob Dylan, but just Bobby to Louie Kemp.

In 1954, Emmett Watson at age 18 is released from a juvenile work farm in Salina, Kansas after serving fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother had abandoned the family many years before. His father was a failing farmer. He had passed away, and the farm was in foreclosure. Emmett came home to the farm just to pick up his 8-year-old brother Billy, and his baby-blue 1948 Studebaker Land Cruiser, and make his way to California to start a new life.

However, two of his teenage friends from the work farm escaped and ended up joining them. The trip Emmett thought he was taking ended up turning into a completely different direction.

The Lincoln Highway is a novel that is structured unusually. The author took some risks by doing that. For instance, it has 10 chapters and it starts with chapter 10, and then works its way down to 1 as the book progresses. That’s unusual and strange, and if it did anything to help the story, I’d say that’s ok. But I could not find anything that made a difference, so why did he do that?

The chapters are divided into subchapters, each told from the perspective of a different character. Two of the characters, Sally and Duchess, tell the story in the first person from their own perspective. The other chaperts were told in the third person by an outside narrator. I also don’t understand why he did that, since it too didn’t add value to the story. It just made it read “odd.”

Emmett Watson is the main character. He is a person of solid values, honest, responsible and remarkably well organized and calm.

Billy Watson is Emmett’s 8-year-old brother, and probably the smartest of the whole gang.

Duchess is an 18-year-old youth who was abandoned by his father, a washed-out actor and drunk, when he literally sold him out to the authorities for a bauble, a golden watch he stole off a dead man, and had him sent to the juvenile facility when he was 16.

Woolly is a trust fund kid raised in a New York old money family. He has some type of autism and needs strong medication to remain functional.

Sally is the daughter of Emmett’s neighbor, who took care of Billy while Emmett was locked up and his father had passed.

Every one of the characters is well developed, and as the story progresses over a period of just 10 days, we get to know each one of them, and their lives in America in the 1940ies and 1950ies.

Sometimes I had to laugh out loud, and many times I was sad about the depth of the human tragedy and the realization that every human being has a completely different story to tell, a different set of memories, and a different character that developed from a string of endless moments that eventually brings them to this very point in life.

The Lincoln Highway is going to be an American Classic.